Both the
World Declaration on Education for All and its accompanying
Framework for Action are concerned with broad policy goals
and targets, in only some of which the provision of school
books and learning materials play a part. With respect to
that provision, the Framework for Action sets out the following
principles:

Addressing
the basic learning needs of all means capitalizing on the
use of traditional and modern information media and technologies,
both of which should be designed to ensure equitable access,
sustained participation, and effective learning achievement.

National
and subnational planning should cover, among other subjects,
the basic learning needs to be met, the languages to be
used in education, ways of mobilizing family and local community
support, requirements for capital and recurrent resources,
possible measures for cost effectiveness, targets and specific
objectives, and indicators and procedures for monitoring
progress towards those targets.

Attention
should be paid to reduction of inefficiency in the public
sector and exploitative practices in the private sector;
provision of improved training for public administrators
and of incentives to retain qualified women and men in public
service; and provision of measures to encourage wider participation
in the design and implementation of basic education programs

Efficiency
in basic education does not mean providing education at
the lowest cost, but rather the most effective use of all
resources (human, organizational, and financial) to produce
the desired levels of access and of necessary learning achievement.

Pre-
and in-service training programs for key personnel should
be initiated, or strengthened where they do exist. [In this
context, curriculum developers are mentioned, but not publishing
professionalism.]

The
quality and delivery of basic education can be enhanced
through the judicious use of instructional technologies,
such as educational radio and television, computers, and
audio-visual instructional devices), which over time will
become less expensive and more adaptable to a range of environments.

Existing
regional partnerships will need to be strengthened and provided
with the resources necessary for their effective functioning
in helping countries meet the basic learning needs of their
populations.

Textbook
availability

Most governments,
and most educators, would like to provide every student with
a complete set of school books in every subject, free of charge.
That, at least, is the ideal target - a textbook:pupil ratio
of 1:1. In fact, it is a target imported from the industrialized
nations that may be unnecessarily expensive. An often-quoted
experiment in the Philippines suggests that when school books
are the property of the school and are not taken home, there
is only a marginal difference between ratios of 1:1 and 1:2,
and some experts have suggested that a ratio of 1:3 should
be regarded as satisfactory (Brunswic and Hajjar 1992, 19).
Very few countries outside the industrialized North could
afford to reach even the lowest of these targets in 1990.
Instead, as a result of global recession and rising enrolments,
the standard of textbook provision deteriorated during the
late 1970s and the 1980s throughout Africa and in much of
Latin America and Asia. It was well below the ideal as the
decade came to a close (Table 1).

A survey
in 1990-1 of Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru,
and Venezuela (members of SECAB, la Secretería de Educación
del Convenio Andés Bello) found that only 32% of pupils between
grades 1 and 5 had textbooks; variations between countries
ranged from 64% in Chile to 20% or less in Ecuador, Peru,
and Venezuela. In Mexico, the figure rose to 75% thanks to
a national textbook program; in Brazil, it was estimated at
about 33% (Lizarzaburu 1995). The national averages mask serious
variations, as the comments in Table 1 and the data in Tables
2 and 3 demonstrate. In general, book provision was much better
in the cities and towns than in rural areas, and areas that
were difficult to reach had the fewest books - sometimes none.
The pattern of rural deprivation has been most clearly documented
in Africa. A summary of book sector studies in eight African
countries found satisfactory to good ratios in the elite schools
in important urban areas, but generally low levels of textbook
provision at the primary level. Angola, Kenya, Nigeria, and
Tanzania recorded primary-level textbook:pupil ratios of 2:3
or better in urban areas, but 1:20 or worse elsewhere. In
Nigeria, the situation grew notably worse as one travelled
northwards; in the majority of schools visited during a book
sector study the textbook:pupil ratio was 1:10 and sometimes
1:100. In Tanzania, a primary-level mathematics book that
was available at a 1:3 ratio in the Southern Highlands plummeted
to 1:700 in the Lake zone. Only Sierra Leone had achieved
a broad equity of supply between rural and urban areas, at
a ratio of 1:3, as a result of an externally funded textbook
project that paid particular attention to distribution networks.
(Before the project, the ratio in Sierra Leone was close to
1:1,000.) At the secondary level, few books were available
in Angola, Tanzania, and Zambia; in Kenya, Nigeria, and Sierra
Leone the ratios were between 1:10 and 1:28, implying only
one or two textbooks per class. Elite secondary schools, once
again, were likely to have more textbooks. Most of the textbooks
in the secondary schools had been repaired and maintained
for 15 to 20 years (Buchan et al. 1991, 13, 15, 98, 118).

Table
1. Availability of Textbooks in Selected Countries, Various
Years (not available)

Variations
between subjects and grades have also been noted. In Burundi,
books were available only for language arts subjects in French
and Kirundi (Eisemon 1993, 133). The SECAB survey of grades
1 to 5 in six South American countries found that while 70%
of the students had textbooks in Spanish language, only 30%
had textbooks in mathematics and fewer than 10% had them in
science and social science (Lizarzaburu 1995).

Where
books were provided free of charge, those for a particular
subject or grade were often unavailable when needed because
of delays in printing and distribution. Where books were sold,
variations reflected parental priorities and incomes. Parents
were more likely to buy books in subjects that would contribute
to their child's future financial success. In provinces of
China where rural schools had little in the way of state-provided
learning resources and parents bought books, teachers in the
poorest areas sometimes bought books for children from their
own salaries (Colclough and Lewin 1993, 92).

At the
tertiary level, textbooks in Africa and many other countries
were in chronically short supply. A great majority were imported,
and had become prohibitively expensive, despite schemes sponsored
by the British and French governments to supply special low-cost
editions. Shortages were more serious in teacher training
and vocational institutes than in universities (Buchan et
al. 1991, 16).

Quality
of textbooks

The translation
of broad curriculum outlines to a concrete book is no simple
task. The book must be written at a level of concept, content,
and vocabulary that is appropriate for the majority of pupils
at the grade level and in a way that, ideally, will interest
and motivate them. It must be consistent in approach, method,
and explanation. It should be of use to the less qualified
teacher but allow the good teacher to expand upon its content.
Writing a good textbook requires the skills of a subject specialist,
a curriculum expert, a good teacher with classroom experience,
and an imaginative author, and as a result the writing of
such books is increasingly a team effort.

In 1990
there was ample evidence that the books used in schools in
many parts of the world fell below these standards. They suffered
from poor instructional design, particularly in the scope
and sequence of material. A study of textbooks for grades
1, 3, and 5 in 15 countries (cited in Lockheed 1993, 22) found
that for the earlier grades the material in mathematics and
reading was too difficult; in grade 5, the mathematics books
were also too difficult but the reading books would have been
more suitable for students in grades 2 and 3. Textbooks in
Pakistan were characterized by poor language grading from
one level to another and even between subjects at the same
level; teachers said the books were overly difficult for their
students. Difficult books in the early grades were seen as
contributing to the high early drop-out rate in many countries.

A study
of textbooks in Mozambique found that, while they followed
the established curriculum, they were generally too theoretical
and lacked sufficient linkages to the everyday experiences
of the target users (Sida 1996, 11). Neumann (1980, 63) quoted
a deputy minister of education in the Philippines as saying
that textbooks in his country should be aimed towards the
schools in poor villages; nevertheless, most of the officially
approved school books in the 1980s catered for the urban elite.

Textbooks
also suffered from errors in fact and grammar, inappropriate
illustrations, and a poor choice of language or script. In
many of the African countries, books were written in English,
French, or Portuguese, even though in any one country fewer
than 20% of the population was likely to be literate in any
one of these metropolitan languages (Altbach 1995, 289; Bgoya
1997, 34). Textbooks in the republics of the USSR were in
Russian, ignoring local languages such as Azeri, Turkmen,
Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz. In Pakistan (Lockheed 1993, 22),
children could not read fluently the Arabic style Nasakh script
favoured by the curriculum developers and textbook writers,
and as a result depended on their teachers to read the books
for them and summarize the lessons.

In text
and illustration, the books tended to reinforce traditional
views of men and women. Lockheed and Verspoor (1991, 149-50)
cite various studies showing girls or women in passive roles.
A primary book in Swaziland depicted a boy happily playing
ball and a girl shying away from a snake. In the 29 most widely
used primary textbooks in Peru, three-quarters of all references
to and illustrations of people were of men. Similar discrepancies
characterized the representation of men and women in school
books from Costa Rica, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen, and Zambia. There were signs of change.
In Costa Rica, after new books were produced with USAID support,
the proportion of women and girls in illustrations rose from
25% to 31%; female figures no longer were shown as less dependent
and more often in stereotypically male roles; males were sometimes
shown as caring for children or undertaking domestic tasks.

To an
increasing extent, even in former colonial countries, textbooks
were being written by local experts. European books were no
longer being adapted, and even transnational publishers were
using local authors with local teaching experience. If the
books were less perfect pedagogically than their Northern
counterparts, they were less eurocentric and thus more related
to the experience of pupils (Rathgeber 1992, 82).

In most
countries, the physical quality of the books was well below
Northern standards (Buchan et al. 1991,36-7, Lockheed 1993,
24). Imported paper was expensive, binding facilities limited,
and machinery old and in need of repair. As a result, books
were too often poorly printed on low-grade paper, inadequately
bound by the adhesive ("perfect") method, and used only black
and white illustrations of varying quality. Such books could
not stand up to the rigours of rainy climates, when pupils
often had to walk long distances between home and school.
Everywhere, the perfect-bound books were apt to fall apart.
Externally funded textbook projects often used better paper
and their products could be expected to last three years or
more. Some incorporated four-colour printing, a feature that
might be difficult to retain after the project closed.

The number
of subjects, and therefore the number of textbooks, was increasing
in some countries. This trend was evident in Africa (Buchan
1991, 6; Brunswic and Hajjar 1992, 9), where it was increasing
strains on budgets and teachers. In most cases, however, only
core subjects were actually available, and some countries
were reversing the trend. Mozambique, for example, had decided
to concentrate on six core subjects for Grade 5 as opposed
to the 11 subjects then taught in Tanzania. Ethiopia had decided
to teach three subjects (natural and exact sciences and geography)
as environmental studies, with a single textbook.

Use
of textbooks

Statistics
of textbook provision are notoriously unreliable. Books that
are reported to have been produced do not always reach the
schools. They may be damaged in transit, pilfered, or, more
commonly, held up in district storehouses for lack of resources
to carry them further. Those that reach the schools, moreover,
may not be used in the classroom. This was apparently often
the case in 1990.

The reasons
for non-use varied. In some countries, government regulations
made ill-paid teachers responsible for replacing lost and
damaged books, and as a result teachers kept the books locked
up. Teachers were not trained in the methods of new textbooks,
and therefore hesitated to use them, or were reluctant to
use them because their interests and experiences, and those
of their students, were not reflected in the content. Some
teachers felt threatened by new textbooks, and there was some
evidence (cited in Psacharopoulos and Woodhall 1985, 221)
that less experienced teachers, who might be expected to benefit
most from a carefully prepared textbook, were less likely
to use them than their more experienced colleagues.

Teachers'
guides and supplementary materials

Teachers'
guides were seldom available in developing countries. Lockheed
and Verspoor (1991, 53) cite various studies: schools in Guinea-Bissau
had guides only for grade 1; in Malawi, fewer than 15% of
teachers had received a guide for a subject other than English;
in rural Brazil, only 44% of teachers had received teachers'
guides. Where textbooks were bought by parents rather than
provided by the state, teachers' guides were apt to be in
particularly short supply. Moreover, many guides were unrelated
to the ability of the average classroom teacher and were often
designed without consideration of the teacher's reading fluency
or the conditions under which the guides would be read; small
type, for example, was ill-suited to be read in the poor lighting
of rural communities (Buchan et al. 1991, 7).

Where
textbooks were in short supply, supplementary materials might
be expected to be even more scarce. In many countries school
libraries either did not exist or had fallen into disrepair
at the primary and secondary levels, except in elite public
or private schools. Book stocks were outdated, and very often
eurocentric. At the tertiary level, textbooks and reference
works were so scarce that students resorted to wholesale photocopying
of library titles, if not to theft or mutilation. Even university
libraries that had been well stocked in the past had been
unable to buy many new books or journals for some years. Public
libraries, a resource for school children, also deteriorated,
although Mexico (Magaloni 1993, 81) was remarkable in creating
some 3,500 new public libraries in the period 1982-92 in a
national system that served 71 million readers stretching
from the capital to remote villages isolated by mountains,
river, and jungle.

In nine
African countries surveyed in book sector studies, libraries
and supplementary materials were seriously underfunded as
governments channelled scarce resources primarily into textbooks.
The majority of primary and secondary schoolchildren had no
access to books or other reading materials apart from textbooks.
Most books that were available were European in origin and
inappropriate in content. There were not enough books about
African history, geography, literature, or cultures. Teachers
and principals were not trained in the maintenance and use
of school libraries. At the secondary level, school libraries
were disintegrating in stock, buildings, furniture, and trained
staff. In some countries, governments distributed supplementary
reading materials to the schools but did not develop the infrastructure
to store and use them. Sierra Leone, however, did take that
important basic step and, as a result, supplementary materials
it had distributed to the schools five years earlier were
still in place (Buchan et al. 1991, 53-6; British Council
1992, 17-20).

Schools
that did have supplementary materials performed better than
those that did not. The Escuela Nueva program in Colombia
used a variety of instructional materials, including school
libraries, to great effect. High achieving schools in Thailand
benefited from community support for the purchase of supplementary
text materials. Supplementary materials were also reported
to have been used successfully at the Gonakelle school in
Sri Lanka and in adult literacy programs in Nepal (Lockheed
and Levin 1993, 9).

Methods
of textbook provision

Pupils
in public systems of education received textbooks in one of
three ways:

1 Provided
free of charge by the state This was the method followed
in many countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the
socialist republics of eastern Europe and western Asia. Free
provision was more common in primary schools than at the secondary
level. Books might be produced cheaply and given to the pupils
each year for them to keep (as in the soviet republics), or
given to the schools and lent to the pupils for their use
during the school year on the understanding that they would
be returned.

The provision
of free books was intended to ensure equity in availability
(although it did not) and responded to a viewpoint expressed
by one Mexican expert (quoted in Neumann 1980, 54) that "if
a government says that elementary education becomes an obligation
for every citizen, then the government should provide the
facilities for such education." Remarkably, in some African
countries university students were given free tuition and
free books but primary students were expected to pay for books,
thus reinforcing an elite at the expense of the broader population
(Psacharopoulos and Woodhall 1985, 187).

2 Sold
through commercial channels Parents or students bought
books, usually through retail outlets. The price of books
might be subsidized by the state, sometimes with external
assistance. Textbooks were sold at the primary level in some
countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
In the newly industrialized countries of Asia, textbooks were
generally published by privately owned companies that worked
closely with the educational authorities but usually received
only limited assistance or subsidy from the government. Practices
could vary within a single country: in Nigeria, primary-level
textbooks were free in the Northern states but sold in the
Southern and Eastern states (Altbach 1985, 290; Buchan et
al. 1991, 20-1).

Selling
the book inevitably led to inequities. First, bookstores were
located primarily in the urban centres, although textbooks
(a short-term investment with rapid turnover) might be sold
at the beginning of the school year in stationery shops and
other small retail outlets elsewhere. In the primarily rural
Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, for example, textbooks
produced by the provincial textbook board were sold through
a network of wholesale distributors and retailers that stretched
from the provincial capital into the villages. Second, not
all parents could afford to buy textbooks for their children.
In Côte d'Ivoire, a textbook cost about one-tenth of the monthly
salary of the head of an average family (Newton 1995, 378).
Where books were in particularly short supply, as in Angola,
a black market operated with high markups. Third, textbooks
might not be available when needed because of inefficient
ordering by the retailers or delays in shipping, which could
be especially serious in a country or region with many islands,
such as the Philippines or eastern Caribbean.

3 Book
rental Under this method, a school bought or was given
class sets or part class sets of books and issued the books
to the pupils in return for an annual fee. The books would
be returned at the end of the year for re-use. The fee was
set to recover part or all of the cost of replacing the books,
and to that end the rental income was placed in a revolving
fund. This method allowed educational authorities to amortize
the cost of books over a three- to five-year period, depending
on the anticipated life of the textbook, and thus reduce the
annual cost to the pupils or their parents. Such a system
had been operating successfully in Lesotho for eight years,
despite some problems, including delinquency in payments and
inaccurate projections of needs. The government was planning,
however, to supplement rental fees with an annual allocation
to cover the costs of distribution and administration (Buchan
et al 1991, 20; British Council 1992, 14-15). Rental schemes
were seen as particularly desirable at the secondary level,
but could operate in primary and tertiary institutions. In
a variation on such schemes, parents might be required to
supplement government allocations. In Fiji, for example, because
a flat grant from the Ministry of Education for each enrolled
pupil was not large enough to cover full operating costs,
some school committees charged parents a small sum for the
purchase of textbooks, library books, and other materials
(UNESCO 1986, 11). In private schools, students would normally
be expected to buy textbooks, which might or might not be
the same as those used in the public system.

Production
of textbooks

Historically,
the provision of textbooks in developing countries followed
three stages. Initially, the countries imported existing books
from the North, usually from the colonial or former colonial
power. Next, they began using adapted versions of foreign
books, modified to meet local needs and experience, and often
published by transnational companies based in the former colonial
power. In the third stage, books were written and produced
locally, often by the state.

By 1990
most countries had achieved local production, at least of
primary texts, although specialized secondary textbooks were
more likely to be adapted and tertiary texts often were imported.
Typically, each country sought to produce its own books, sometimes
without taking advantage of possible adaptations that would
benefit from investments already made by other publishers
in developing instructional methods. International trade in
textbooks, either as licensing of adaptations or as imports
of finished books, generally followed the path of North to
South from the metropolitan countries of Europe and North
America . To support local production, some countries imposed
regulatory barriers. Zimbabwe, which secured its books entirely
from the private sector, required local reprinting of foreign-originated
books that sold more than 5,000 copies, and indeed had begun
exporting textbooks to neighbouring countries (Rathgeber 1992,
87-8; Brunswic and Hajjar 1992, 12).

Local
production was common even in sub-Saharan Africa, where large-scale
book production was still relatively new and where the shortage
of books was so acute that Hans Zell, the principal chronicler
of African publishing, could exclaim (Zell 1990, 21) that
"The picture of Africa at the end of the 1980s is largely
that of a bookless society."

In anglophone
sub-Saharan Africa, British transnationals (notably Macmillan,
Heinemann, Oxford, Longman) had established sales offices
which, in the more populated countries, functioned as regional
publishers. As a result of the economic recession of the 1980s,
many of these transnational branches closed, leaving behind
trained editors and other staff who were ready to begin their
own enterprises. By 1990 several branches had passed to private
local ownership or control (for example, in Kenya and Nigeria).
Elsewhere, foreign publishers entered into joint ventures
with locally owned publishers of textbooks, which were often
parastatal organizations in which the state retained a controlling
share. Namibia, unlike other anglophone countries of Africa,
still depended primarily on imports, in its case from South
Africa.

The countries
of francophone Africa still imported large quantities of textbooks
from France. In 1987, francophone Africa, excluding the Magreb,
represented 13% of the export market for French books, even
though prices there averaged 44% more than those in other
French export markets that benefited from cheaper insurance
and shipping and lower risk (Prillaman 1992, 199). In 1990,
10 countries of francophone Africa imported FF 163.7 million
worth of books from France; in six of the 10, textbooks accounted
for almost two-thirds of the total book imports; in the other
four, where Arabic was a significant language, the textbook
proportion shrank to 36% (Newton 1995, 376). French publishers
also had stakes in locally controlled textbook publishing
houses. Local print runs could be substantial: le Centre d'édition
et distribution africain (CEDA), owned jointly by the government
of Côte d'Ivoire and the French publisher Hatier, printed
250,000 copies of one textbook.

Regional
cooperation in publishing was rare. The ministries of education
of eight francophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa, however,
began the process in 1988 by identifying core subjects, such
as French, mathematics, and science, in which they could develop
common curricula and textbooks. By 1990 they were well under
way to producing the first books in mathematics (British Council
1992, 23).

In both
anglophone and francophone Africa, state-owned and parastatal
publishers benefited from hidden subsidies (for example, rent
and staff costs that did not need to be recovered from sales,
tax exemptions on supplies, subsidized state-owned or parastatal
printing). Locally owned private publishers occasionally ventured
into the school market, but for the most part they were marginalized
by the much larger transnational, foreign, state-owned, or
parastatal textbook publishing operations.

The
role of the state in school book provision

In virtually
every country of the world, the state is involved to some
extent in the provision of learning materials - at the very
least by establishing the curricula on which school books
are based and, even in the freest of markets, by buying some
or all of the materials used in the public system. In most
of the world outside Western Europe and North America, the
state played a much greater role than that in 1990. In many
countries, the same Ministry of Education unit that defined
the curriculum was also responsible for writing the books
to support it. School books were printed in plants that were
owned by governments or parastatals. Books were published
by the Ministry or by parastatals under its control. Distribution
also was often the responsibility of the Ministry or a parastatal.
In some countries, particularly those with communist or strongly
socialist governments, the entire process - from writing to
use in the schools - was carried out by government ministries
or agencies. In the USSR, for example, all curricular materials
were designed, controlled, manufactured, and distributed free
of charge, in sufficient quantities, by the state; the republics
all had a uniform supply of such materials and followed the
same curricula. In other countries the private sector might
be involved in one stage or more of textbook provision. However,
even in some countries with large commercial publishing industries,
such as India, the state might retain responsibility for publishing
textbooks for the public system.

Searle
(1985, 9) listed possible combinations of private and state
engagement and showed how functional responsibilities were
divided in 25 countries where the World Bank had financed
projects that had textbook provision as a component (Table
4). Almost all the projects were in four regions: Eastern
Africa, Western Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and
East Asia and the Pacific. The diversity of patterns was remarkable.
For the 25 countries examined there were 19 different patterns
or arrangements of the four aspects of textbook provision
considered. Only two patterns recurred.

State
predominance was more evident in the ten African countries
surveyed by Brunswic and Hajjar (Table 5). In most of the
countries of francophone Africa, a specialized institution
(commonly called l'Institut pédagogique national) was responsible
for developing editorial guidelines, preparing manuscripts,
and commissioning, publishing, printing, and/or approving
textbooks. In Sénégal and Togo, the Ministry of Education
had direct responsibility (Newton 1995, 374).

In some
countries, state involvement in the provision of learning
materials, as in other parts of the economy, was a matter
of ideology. In others it began as a response to perceived
necessity. With independence, former colonies had no indigenous
source of school books. Foreign publishers who had supplied
textbooks in the past were suspect as agents of colonialism,
and were themselves wary of investing in or extending credit
to the newly independent countries. Yet there was an immediate
need, not only in the former colonies but everywhere in the
developing world, for cheap books to educate growing populations
in curricula that had been revised to meet new national conditions
and aspirations, and at the higher level to meet the demand
for trained professionals and public servants. The private
sector of most countries did not have the infrastructure or
the capital to meet this challenge, and most families did
not have the money to

Table
5. Functional responsibilities in 10 African countries with
respect to textbooks (number of countries under each function)
not availble

buy commercially
produced books at full cost. Very small countries, such as
the island states of the South Pacific, had no alternative
to state responsibility. The task was taken on by government,
if not from political belief, by default.

State
involvement was seen as a means of controlling the use of
scarce resources and subsidies. It was believed to be economical
because it eliminated the markups and profit of commercial
printing, publishing, and bookselling. The Ministry could
determine quantities and schedules and ensure they were met.
Those transnational publishers who continued to do business
in developing countries were not averse to working with governments,
particularly if in that way they could secure a monopoly or
dominant position in providing textbooks (Altbach 1996, 4).
The World Bank and other major bilateral donors also worked
with governments as a matter of policy, and in two early large
projects in the Philippines and Indonesia (and in others later)
encouraged the development of a central agency to develop,
produce, and distribute textbooks. A study sponsored by the
World Bank (Lockheed and Verspoor 1991, 128) concluded that:

Developing
sustainable capacity for creating, testing, producing, and
distributing student learning materials - as well as teacher
guides and in-service training materials - requires a significant
commitment of the central ministry's resources. Experience
in Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, and the Philippines suggests
that textbook agencies, whether autonomous or divisions
of the (national or federal) education ministry, are essential
to establishing and sustaining a program of materials development
... Even small countries, where publishing industries are
relatively weak because the market for textbooks is small,
may have to set up a clearly defined unit for developing
instructional materials, carrying out the design, development,
and testing necessary to achieve high quality, and managing
the storage and distribution of materials.

The dominance
of the state impeded the development of private-sector educational
publishing, and thus perpetuated the need for state involvement
in countries where it existed. It also nurtured a "state provider"
mentality (Brickhill et al. 1996, 11) that proved difficult
to dislodge.

Problems
commonly ascribed to government bureaucracies arose. Policies
changed and so did ministers. One major textbook project dealt
with eight ministers of education in four years, each with
a new approach to policy (Read 1992, 207). Civil servants
were often poorly motivated to seek economies and usually
inexperienced in publishing practices. In many countries they
were posted in and out of positions without regard to continuity,
at the sacrifice of institutional memory. There was wastage
and inefficiency, and some corruption - unsurprising when
civil service wages fell far behind the cost of living. There
was inadequate coordination among the various functions of
writing, production, and distribution. An adviser to the World
Bank (Neumann 1980) warned that when government agencies produced
textbook manuscripts for publication, the procedure was fraught
with political implications and conflict of interest. Some
of these problems bedeviled similar experiments everywhere.
In Sweden, for example (Gedin 1991, 137), a huge state-owned
publishing house had collapsed under the weight of a large
bureaucracy and great financial losses.

Separate
state-owned companies, or parastatals, were created in an
effort to retain government control without some of the constraints
of government personnel policies. They were given considerable
managerial and financial autonomy but received funds and sometimes
direction from the government. It was expected that they would
be managed more in line with commercial publishing practices.
Some parastatals were joint ventures between the government
and one or more foreign commercial publishers. CEDA, previously
mentioned, in which the Ivorian government held 51%, was one
such venture, as was les Nouvelles éditions africaines, which,
before its breakup into three national companies in 1988,
was owned jointly by the governments of Sénégal, Côte d'Ivoire,
and Togo (60%) and a consortium of French firms and became
a major force in publishing with a long list of titles (Prillaman
1992, 200-1; Zell 1990, 20). In anglophone Africa British
publishers entered into joint ventures with parastatals in
Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda, experiments which Buchan (1992,
353) characterized as "interesting and desirable ... but too
often the interests of overseas commercial publisher and local
state enterprise were too divergent for them to stay together."

In countries
where the government dominated the writing and publishing
of learning materials, there was normally only one textbook
for each subject/level. This was the case in countries that
required a massive effort simply to produce the single text
in sufficient numbers, such as the Philippines and Indonesia,
in the socialist countries of Asia and eastern Europe, in
the USSR, and in many countries of Africa. In countries that
permitted private-sector educational publishing, there might
be a choice among competing textbooks, although in some cases
the market was dominated by a single publishing house, local
or foreign-owned. Zimbabwe and Nigeria were among the few
African nations that permitted multiple choice in an open
market in which schools chose the texts they would use from
a list of government-approved titles (Rathgeber 1992, British
Council 1992, 8).

Constraints
in provision

Educational
publishers, whether state-controlled or privately owned, faced
serious constraints in 1990. The most important were in financing,
production, distribution, information, and human resources.

Financing
Book publishing of any kind, but especially the publishing
of textbooks, is a capital-intensive business. It typically
takes three years to identify authors, plan, and write a textbook,
edit it, pre-test it in classrooms, prepare it for printing,
print and bind it, and deliver it to the schools. With luck,
the process may take less time, but more often it takes longer.
During this time staff and office expenses must be paid, paper
and other materials bought, printers paid. A competitive textbook
market involves additional expenses for marketing and promotion.
If the books are to be sold, it may take two to three years
more to recoup the capital investment.

The global
recession of the 1980s and the policies of structural adjustment
had a devastating effect on government budgets for education,
especially on non-salary items such as books. Between 1985
and 1990, real public expenditure per student fell at the
primary level in seven of nine Latin American countries for
which data were available and in 13 of 20 in Africa; it also
fell at the secondary level in Africa (World Bank 1995, 69).
Budgets for classroom resources (books, teaching aids, furniture,
and other equipment) were already low. When industrial countries
were allocating 14% of primary-school recurrent costs to classroom
resources and 86% to salaries, Asian countries were allocating
9% to classroom resources and African countries only 4% (Psacharopoulos
and Woodhall 1985, 224). Expenditures on learning materials
and other non-salary recurrent expenses fell in countries
suffering from recession, sometimes to close to zero. Supplementary
materials were first to be affected, then textbooks. The reduction
in learning material procurement may have slowed after the
middle of the decade, but only because by then salaries accounted
for almost all recurrent expenditures. The trend was felt
most strongly in sub-Saharan Africa. There, expenditure on
educational materials represented about 1% of the recurrent
primary school budget in 1983, the equivalent of about US$0.60
per pupil. Given the unequal distribution of books, rural
areas suffered disproportionately (Colclough and Lewin 1993,
168).

Within
this restricted market, educational publishers in the private
sector faced an additional hurdle: finding credit to capitalize
textbook projects. Interest rates rose under structural adjustment,
in some countries to 40% or more. Banks, moreover, were reluctant
to lend money to entrepreneurs in a high-risk, low-profit
industry, or to recognize books in the warehouse or work in
progress as collateral. Paper ceases to be collateral as soon
as it is printed upon.

Under
the stringency of falling export revenues, devaluation, inflation,
and structural adjustment, African governments increased efforts
to achieve partial or full recovery of costs in textbooks.
Lesotho's success has already been mentioned. Ethiopia began
charging for textbooks lent for the school year, with 45%
of the revenue being retained for printing more books and
the balance shared between the schools and the regional offices;
the latter was expected to use its share for expanding school
library facilities. Angola and Mozambique sold textbooks but
subsidized the price substantially. Uganda experimented with
a subsidized rental fee (Brunswick and Hajjar 1992, ii; Buchan
et al. 1991, 20).

Partial
cost recovery, of course, did no more than reduce the problem
of budget shortages. It did not make a nation's educational
publishing program financially self-sustaining. In Ghana,
for example, a long-established system of partial cost recovery
collapsed because revenue was insufficient to maintain supply.
Under new guidelines issued in 1987, textbooks were to be
rented for a fee that was based on the cost of production
and the expected life span of the books. (British Council
1992, 13-14).

For many
countries, cost recovery was a new approach beset with problems.
In Paraguay, for example, a government scheme to sell textbooks
for profit through its Internal Revenue Service offices foundered,
and 90% of the books were unsold (Searle 1985, 18). More commonly,
books were unknowingly sold below true cost because of inadequate
bookkeeping in Ministry or parastatal offices. In 1986 a World
Bank publication suggested a radically different approach
- one that would be relatively easy to administer if politically
difficult - for cost recovery in one sector to benefit another.
The authors proposed that governments eliminate the free tuition
and living allowances then commonly paid to African university
students (a practice that reinforced an already existing elite)
and invest the money thus saved in primary education. They
calculated that if 12 African countries were to eliminate
living allowances, the public resources thus freed would allow,
on average, an 18% expansion in the yearly budget for primary
education. Nationally, the figure ranged from just under 3%
in Sudan to more than 40% in Togo. If fees were introduced
to cover all the operating costs of higher education, an additional
expansion of 22.5% in primary education would be possible
(World Bank 1986, 21).

Production
Paper was the single most expensive item in book production
costs, representing between 45% and 70% of the cost of manufacture.
Most of the paper suitable for books was produced in the North,
and prices were set by demand from the prime user, the United
States. Countries which had developed their own paper-making
capacity often protected it with high tariffs, even for educational
purposes, and locally produced paper was sometimes more expensive
than superior stock produced overseas. (In the North, in contrast,
paper represented about 30% of total manufacturing costs,
reflecting relatively higher costs of labour.)

Book printing
is specialized work, different in its requirements from printing
newspapers, magazines, or commercial products. Capacity was
limited by the number of book printers in most countries and
by the quality of their equipment. Costs were driven up when
presses and other machinery were old and ill-maintained, occasioning
frequent need for repairs and consequent down time. Paper
was misappropriated, damaged in transit, or used inefficiently
because of mismatches between available sheet sizes and the
printer's press size. A publisher in one developing country
suggested that paper wastage from mismatching could reach
as high as 50% (Priestley forthcoming). Books were also delayed
by mismatches in equipment - most commonly between new high-speed
presses and outdated binding technology. The shortage of thread-binding
equipment forced dependence on adhesive binding and resulted
in books that fell apart. Printing and binding machinery,
spare parts, and materials were subject to high duties and
sales taxes. Under such conditions, quality suffered, as did
prices and schedules.

Local
control of publishing does not require local printing. Commercial
publishers in the North commonly crossed oceans in search
of the most cost-effective printing. Many governments in the
South, however, insisted that books be printed at home, often
in state-owned or parastatal plants, regardless of efficiency
or cost. In three of nine African countries surveyed in book
sector studies, local printing prices were higher than could
be obtained outside the country (Buchan et al. 1991, 35).
Donated printing equipment not infrequently sat gathering
dust for lack of trained operators or because there was no
local service agency to repair it. Some equipment stood idle
for much of the year because its capacity was far greater
than needed.

Distribution
Geography impedes distribution in much of the global South.
Some countries are archipelagos - there are 10,000 islands
in Indonesia, and 7,000 in the Philippines - or are themselves
islands separated by ocean from their neighbours. Transport
is impeded by rivers, mountains, deserts, jungles. Roads are
poor, and trucking often inadequate. Tens of thousands of
schools are hours from the nearest road, and books for them
must be delivered by canoe, head porterage, or pack animal.
State-supported distribution systems generally depended on
teachers, parents, or the community to carry learning materials
from district depots to isolated schools. Even that system
was seen to be breaking down as teachers' salaries dropped
in real terms and were paid less reliably.

Where
the state was responsible for distribution, books typically
were gathered in a central warehouse and shipped to district
depots, whence they were directed to schools. In some countries
there was an additional step, books going first to regional
depots, to be divided there for transshipment to districts
and thence to schools. At each stage, there was the possibility
of failure. District offices often lacked the funds to pay
forwarders, sometimes because the money had not been provided,
sometimes because they had never accounted properly for the
previous year's advance for that purpose. Packaging and storage
were often inadequate to protect the books against water,
insects, mould, and vermin. In one instance during the rainy
season in 1984, new books were delivered to a regional store
in Ghana that had no roof; within days the books were soaked
and useless (Read 1992, 314).

Books
could be delayed by erratic shipping schedules or by the pursuit
of economies. In order to ship books efficiently orders were
often consolidated, in which case the total order could be
held up until the last title was delivered by the printer
or publisher. Sometimes distribution costs were unnecessarily
high: in the scattered islands of the eastern Caribbean, for
example, textbooks were sometimes delivered by freighter or
even more expensive air freight, despite the presence of a
regular, reliable, and inexpensive domestic service that provided
baking flour to the islands by boat (Clare 1993, 32).

Efficient,
economical distribution was further impeded by a lack of adequate
information from the schools. Depot storekeepers were untrained
in inventory control and maintenance. Books were damaged,
lost, or stolen. A combination of delays, from development
through to distribution, could result in books being delivered
a year, or even three years, behind schedule (Searle 1985,
23).

In most
countries where books were sold through retail outlets, bookstores
were scarce in the urban centres and almost unknown outside
the cities. Distribution depended on an informal network of
suppliers.

Information
Efficient provision requires accurate and timely information
on which to project enrolments, and therefore textbook needs,
by school, grade and subject. Central planners need data on
the number, size, and type of schools; current enrolments
by grade, school, sex, and age; historical and projected rates
of change in enrolment; numbers of teachers; numbers of school
libraries, and so on. This kind of information was difficult
to accumulate in countries where communication by telephone
or mail was unreliable. Data were incomplete, sometimes false,
more often outdated, and pitted with errors created during
collation at several steps up the ladder to the central office.

Human
resources Ministry of Education staff were rarely familiar
with printing and publishing practices. Curriculum developers
were often expected to make major decisions with little or
no idea about the implications in cost or time involved. Costs
were inflated by ill-informed decisions about book length,
illustrations, colours, and format. Government, parastatal,
and private-sector publishers all suffered from a lack of
trained personnel - authors, editors, evaluators, designers,
production coordinators, distribution and warehouse supervisors,
financial and publishing managers. Some publishing institutions
obtained training through partnership with overseas commercial
publishers. Others sent staff to short-term training courses
within Africa or for long-term training abroad, but these
resources in 1990 were still relatively limited.

The
role of funding agencies and donors

To fund
the growing needs of education, governments looked for international
help. The World Bank expanded its mandate from project-related
vocational training to provide support for school buildings,
textbooks, curriculum development, and institutional development.
The proportion of education projects with textbook components
grew steadily, from about 6% before 1974 to 32% in 1979-83
to almost 65% by 1990 (Read 1992, 308). In northeast Brazil,
a Bank project tripled the number of students receiving textbooks;
in the Philippines, a massive effort was funded to reduce
the textbook:pupil ratio from 1:10 to 1:2 (Lockheed 1993,
24). In three projects alone, in the Philippines, Indonesia,
and Ethiopia, more than 350 million textbooks were produced.
The process was not without growing pains, however, as Barbara
Searle (1985, 25) recognized in a review of the Bank's educational
projects over the previous 10 years. She identified serious
shortcomings:

This
review makes it clear that at least some of the projects
approved early in this decade recognized that textbook publishing
is complex and highly technical; that it requires professional
competence in many specialties; and that developing a good
textbook takes time, three years at a minimum. Yet, even
with this recognition, projects underestimated the difficulties.
Of the nine projects surveyed, only three ... left behind
functioning textbook provision schemes. Beyond this, the
completed projects provide evidence for shortfalls in every
aspect of textbook provision: poor quality books, inadequate
distribution systems, inability to establish and maintain
production schedules, inadequate procedures for handling
paper procurement, teacher training activities out of phase
with book publication, poor coordination between curriculum
and manuscript development, and, above all, failure to establish
institutions that can continue to provide good quality books
after project completion.

Ninety
per cent of the 48 projects she reviewed financed the purchase
or printing of textbooks, but fewer than half included teacher
training, monitoring and evaluation, or dealt with policy
changes. Only half the projects that provided books also financed
manuscript development and book distribution, and only half
of those (11 projects) also financed teacher training. Only
10 projects explicitly dealt with the institutional structure
of the textbook provision system and modified it in some way.
She concluded that

the
likelihood of a textbook component attaining its objectives
is directly related to the extent to which the project design
addresses all aspects of the textbook provision system.
It is not crucial that a project finance every component.
However, the analysis of the system that is undertaken during
preparation and appraisal must include all aspects to make
sure that the entire supporting system is in place and functioning
well (Searle 1985, 18).

The World
Bank was the leading, but not the only international, agency
supporting textbook provision. The British Overseas Development
Administration had textbook programs in Sierra, Leone, Jamaica,
and Jordan. Its three-year project in Sierra Leone, where
there was no publishing capacity when financing began in 1984,
extended beyond book provision to creation of school storage
and a school management system, teacher training in a new
curriculum and use of textbooks, warehouse improvement, and
training of publishing staff (Buchan 1992, 360-1). In francophone
Africa, l'Agence de coopération culturelle et technique, supported
by France, Canada, and Belgium, distributed dictionaries and
reading materials to schools, and in 1990 was organizing a
training program in printing, publishing, book distribution
and bookstore management (Prillaman 1992, 205-6). Scandinavian
governments were notable for their support of book development.
The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
was active in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau,
Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia; the Finnish International
Development Agency (FINNIDA), in Namibia and Zambia; and Danish
International Development Assistance (Danida), in Burkina
Faso, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Non-governmental
organizations, often with funding from their national government's
aid agency, played a small but increasing role as well. The
Canadian Organization for Development through Education (CODE),
for example, supplied paper and distributed supplementary
materials, and several book-related organizations in Europe
organized short training courses.

The smaller
contributions were generally ad hoc, uncoordinated, and short-term.
Individual agencies had their own agendas, political or altruistic.
Several projects involved the supply of paper, a short-term
solution to immediate needs that could have the longer-term
effect of distorting the market. (Unless the equivalent cost
of the donated paper was recognized when it was used, book
prices would rise abruptly when the supply ended and paper
had again to be bought on the market. Then fiscal allocations
for textbooks would have to be increased or, more often, textbook
provision sharply reduced.) Equipment was too often supplied
without spare parts or technical support for maintenance and
repair. One-time seminars and workshops were held for writers,
editors, publishers, printers, and booksellers, but with little
or no follow-up, and funding agencies were sometimes disappointed
to find that people, once trained, moved from school book
publishing to better paying jobs. Funders complained that
they had difficulty in identifying all the links in the publishing
chain and in understanding the broad concerns that underlay
what might seem a simple project. The impact of much of the
effort was short-lived and local (Priestley 1993, 215; Priestley
forthcoming).

One major
exception was a loan guarantee scheme started in Kenya by
the Dag Hammarskjøld Foundation, with support from the Ford
Foundation of US$300,000. The Foundation negotiated with local
banks to guarantee credit extended to local publishers in
a normal way. Kenya was chosen because it had a well developed
book market, but one then dominated by transnational publishers.
Eleven applications for loans were accepted under the scheme.
There were problems in communication - the banks initially
expected to be repaid as soon as books were published, not
understanding that it takes time to recover publishing costs
through sales - and some of the borrowers ran into difficulty
because of financial or marketing inexperience. Nevertheless,
only three publishers failed to repay their loans and had
to be rescued by the guarantee. The scheme was significant
in assisting the indigenization of Heinemann Kenya which now,
as East African Educational Publishers Limited, is one of
the strongest publishing houses on the continent. The project
showed that small publishers who are able to gain access to
commercial credit and who manage their finances carefully
can succeed, even with interest rates as high as 30% to 40%
(Priestley 1993, 216; Davies 1997, 86-9).

Table
6. Different types of aid to primary education, 1981-1986 (%
of total) not availble

Major
funders generally were more interested in institutional development
than in supplying learning materials. They believed that direct
support to pupils and teachers would be less efficient than
funding central units for teacher training, curriculum development,
and educational planning that could increase the effectiveness
of the entire system (Colclough and Lewin 1993, 251). Books
and instructional materials received only a small percentage
of total donor aid to education (Table 6).

Major
textbook projects, moreover, were directed to short-term gains
to overcome immediate and urgent shortages. Typically, they
lasted three to five years and gave little attention to building
local publishing capacity. The size, urgency, and complexity
of the projects precluded local publishers from participating.
That responsibility devolved on ministries and parastatals
which were themselves ill-prepared and which, outside the
project's funding, were at the mercy of legislative budget
allocations and government policy changes. There was no long-term
approach, among funders or governments, to the sustainable
provision of learning materials.

There
was, however, a growing interest in cooperation among donors
and funding agencies. They met together, formally or informally,
to discuss possible joint projects or to exchange information.
Some donors preferred that these meetings be held only at
the invitation of, and with full participation by, the potential
recipients of aid; others were satisfied to meet as a donor
group and offer a package of assistance. Some recipients saw
the second approach as unfair "ganging up" on recipients (Priestley
1993). Donors for African Education, which had been started
during the 1980s as a donors' club to promote collaboration
in educational projects and programs in Africa and thereby
avoid competition and duplication, eventually expanded its
membership in response to such concerns and, to emphasize
partnership over assistance, changed its name to the Association
for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). Its Working
Group on Books and Learning Materials, established in 1989,
included African ministries of education as well as development
agencies concerned with book development and procurement (Treffgarne
1999, 20).